If Your Telephone Isn’T Working, Please Call the Office: The Hard-To-Believe Adventures of Teaching in a Failing School System

By JT Victor

Its a cast of characters that sounds too outrageous to be true: school administrators who disrupt the education of students to pursue pet programs, a superintendent who spends taxpayer dollars to upgrade a private bathroom, and principals that cheat on state testing scores.
JT Victor witnessed all that and more when he was a teacher in inner-city public schools, and he shares it all in this candid account that reveals the shortcomings of a system where most of the problems are caused by adultsnot students.
However, colleges continue to prep future teachers on engaging students and maintaining order in the classroom. Meanwhile, nothing is being done about the people in charge who dont have the best interests of students at heart.
Penny-pinching politicians, disinterested parents, and school administrators pretending to be leaders make it nearly impossible for battle-weary teachers to do their jobs. Despite it all, most teachers continue to succeed and students continue to learn.
It all might seem amusing if it didnt involve our children and tax dollars, which is why you need to know whats going on so it doesnt happen at your school.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Apr 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781480814301

JT Victor

J T Victor has a master’s degree in education and taught in New England secondary schools for thirty-five years and at the college level for almost a decade. He’s retired and lives in Massachusetts, where he remains a loyal Cubs fan.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Welcome Aboard, Sailor

AS I DROVE ROUND the corner, there it was, a brown brick, three-story building almost entirely without windows. Its architecture could best be described as prison modern. Surrounded by graying three story tenements, it appeared to be the only thing in the area that was new in the last fifty years. It was fronted by a parking lot which looked to hold about a hundred cars, and which I pulled into, driving slowly along a line of cars, looking for a space to park. Suddenly, a figure flitted out from between two cars and ran up to the side of my vehicle. Hunched over, his face almost pressed against my driver’s side window, he began screaming, Get this God damned car out of here. Out! Get it out! Goddamn it! You can’t park here, Goddamn it!

But I’m a new teacher here.

I don’t give a damn! Get out of here! Now!

And so I was welcomed to Wolf Middle School by vice principal Ray Williams, the lord and master of the parking lot. What had led up to this moment was every bit as strange. After a nasty divorce, I had moved from the Midwest to the East Coast, a year before, to take a job with a local newspaper. This job left me with Fridays off. I knew few people and needed the money, so I went to the local board of education to apply as a substitute teacher, having taught before moving east. I met with the personnel director, Mr. Fentin, who was a pleasant enough person, and explained my circumstances, hoping for Friday jobs.

He shook his head explaining he needed people who could work every day. I had sent my resume, before moving, in the hope of getting a full time position, and as he shook his head no he made a quick decision, Before you go, let me see your resume. He went out of the room and was back several minutes later. As he came through the door, he was perusing my folder, and his demeanor had changed, rather suddenly, from negative to positive. How would you like a full time job? We have an opening in the industrial arts department.

Suddenly, our positions changed completely. He was trying to hire me, and I was telling him I didn’t want the job. I’ve never taught industrial arts. I really don’t know a thing about it.

Be that as it may, you have experience in teaching in the inner city. Why don’t you try it for this Thursday and Friday, and see how it goes?

Weighing the matter over for several seconds, I thought to myself that I can teach during the day and work the newspaper job at night, and so I made my fateful decision. Alright, I’ll try it for a couple of days.

The next morning, being Thursday, I drove to my new school. The neighborhood it was in could best be compared to post-war Berlin. Several years before the area had been the center of a very severe inner city riot, and absolutely nothing had been done in the interim to repair anything. All around the school were burned out, windowless buildings. At two street corners,small groups of homeless men stood around fifty-five gallon oil drums, filled with burning wood, trying to keep warm in the morning chill before heading off with their waiting supermarket carriages to collect empty bottles for the deposit money. The school, itself, fit right in with its surroundings. The lawn was overgrown with patches of weeds which substituted for grass. Litter was scattered all over it. From the street, you could see several cracked windows in the classrooms facing it. I don’t believe the building had ever seen paint since it had been built, save for the graffiti all over its lower level.

To get in I had to push the front doorbell, and after several minutes, a pleasant African- American man, wearing a full-length fur coat, opened the door and introduced himself as Mr. Bensen. You must be the new industrial arts teacher. Come on in to my office, and I’ll get you all the stuff you’ll need. Your class list and grade book, then I’ll take you down to your room.

Although he never told me his title, I assumed he was the principal as he had keys to everything, plus the few students in the building all seemed to know him and vice versa in a respectful and friendly way. Off we went across creaking and squeaking wood floors through a building that was permeated by a strange pungent, rancid smell. He led me downstairs to a short hallway, stopped in front of a door, and said, I’ll have to unlock the door for you. I’ll get you a key as soon as I can. If you have any problems or questions, see me after school. I’d like to stay to get you started, but I’ve got several students and parents I’ve got to see today. Good luck. And with that he opened the door a crack and went hurrying off leaving me to enter on my own.

I opened the door the rest of the way and stood there taking in the scope of my new workplace. It most certainly was not a sight for the faint of heart. There was a small anteroom the size of a large walk in closet which, judging by numerous coat hooks, had probably been a coatroom in earlier times. The only decorations, other than graffiti on the walls, were several grapefruit sized holes and a telephone.

Going around the corner, I was staggered to see a room the size of a tennis court that stretched behind the building. On one side, there were small, grimy windows high up near the ceiling. On the opposite side, was a wall of twelve large, side by side windows, each with eighteen panes in it. These looked out onto a small park or playground in which a drunk was sitting on a swing, about a hundred feet away, drinking his breakfast. There was a teacher’s desk, empty of everything but mouse droppings, in front of which were sixteen wooden industrial type tables bolted to the floor. There were no chairs anywhere.

On closer inspection, I counted seventy-three of the windowpanes completely broken or at best badly cracked. No wonder that Mr. Bensen wore a fur coat. In the far right corner, were shelves full of hand tools: hammers, screwdrivers, planes and saws. All were jumbled together. On the right, under the skylight windows, were some forlorn power tools: a table saw with no blade, two jigsaws, one missing its table and both without blades, and a wood lathe with no cord. In the left corner, by the large windows, was a four foot high mound of broken paint cans. Paint had spilled out all over the pile of smashed cans somewhat like a flow of rainbow colored lava out of a miniature volcano. It had been this way so long that the whole mass of several hundred cans was fused together and to the floor. All over the room was a litter of pieces of wood, sawdust, candy wrappers and discarded school papers.

For the rest of that day and Friday, I got to know the students, tried to organize the room and worked two jobs. Late Friday afternoon Mr. Bensen popped in and explained that the job was mine, if I wanted it. Once again I made a life changing decision and agreed. In the ensuing days, I came in early, cleaned up some of the mess, managed to get one of the jigsaws going and organized the tools. By the middle of my first week, the students were actually working on some small projects despite many continuing problems. After school, the room was never cleaned, except by me. No one ever came to empty wastepaper baskets, trash barrels, which were full and beginning to overflow, or to do anything about the small mountain of dried out paint cans which I soon christened Mount Vesuvius.

I soon discovered that there really was a janitor, or so I thought. At least there was a janitor’s room in the hallway next to mine. Despite repeatedly banging on the door almost hourly, for a week, no one ever answered even though I knew someone must be in there because the radio was always on so loud as to be dimly heard in my room. The broken windows were posing a real problem too, as the weather was beginning to turn colder, and the early morning classes had to wear their coats to keep warm.

On the way to lunch, one day I ran into Mr. Bensen, as usual in his fur coat, and kidded him that unless something was done about the window situation soon his coat would be in danger of being stolen. He smiled and promised to put in a work order to get them fixed. Another problem that was proving difficult to overcome was Mount Vesuvius. After almost two weeks of hammering away at it with a cold chisel, I had managed to remove only about a dozen mangled cans. It was like chipping away at an iceberg with an ice pick.

There was also another problem that had come to light, the phone. The building, I was in, consisted only of seventh and eighth graders. It was an old grade school that was an annex of a much larger school that housed kindergarten through sixth grade and was located two blocks away. The phone in my anteroom, which I couldn’t see from my class, was directly connected to the much larger building as I soon discovered to my unending distraction. There was also another classroom in the little hallway. It was directly across from mine and consisted of a reading teacher with a bad hairpiece. He had about ten students who he seemed unable to control. They were constantly sneaking into the anteroom and picking up the phone which rang at the main building’s office. There a secretary picked it up to hear a deluge of filth before the phone quickly went dead. The culprits then scooted back across the hall to their own room without ever being caught by Mr. Hairpiece who seemed oblivious to anything that went on in his class.

By the end of the first full week, I had begun to settle into a semblance of routine with teaching, chipping away at Mount Vesuvius and banging on the janitor’s door. There was never any answer, just the same old loud music. Whenever there was any free time, I hacked away at Mount Vesuvius with no noticeable result. At least once a day, I also answered the phone and listened to an irate secretary from the main building rake me over the coals about keeping my students off the phone. Patiently, I explained over and over that the phone culprits were not my students, that I couldn’t even see the phone from my room and to please call Mr. Hairpiece to deal with it. All of this never seemed to register with them, and so the phone went on ringing.

On my second Monday, minutes after starting the day, the phone rang yet again. Wearily, I picked it up expecting to hear an angry secretary at the other end. Instead, it was Mr. Bensen who asked me to report to the office at the end of the period. Dutifully, I knocked on the principal’s door and went in. There, to my surprise, sat a man who introduced himself as Mr. Hideaway, the principal. Needless to say, I was surprised, as I had never seen him before, and Mr. Bensen ran the school. He immediately lit into me. Last night some board of education members had visited my room and were very upset at the condition of it, especially Mount Vesuvius which he stated could be a fire hazard.

Somewhat taken aback by the fact that Mr. Bensen was not the principal, I offered my explanations that I had been trying to patch up the broken windows before and after school with plastic sheeting, purchased at my own expense, sweeping the room on my own and trying to remove Mount Vesuvius without the help of the janitor who could never be found. Calming down a bit, he gave me his word that things would change immediately and ushered me out of his office.

One week later very little had changed. Mount Vesuvius still stood unconquered. The phone still rang with irate secretaries at the other end. As fall progressed cold drafts began to get through my jury-rigged plastic windows. I still cleaned the room up every night after school, but the music had stopped in the janitor’s room. The previous occupant, who was too drunk to do anything but sleep, had been replaced by a smiling man who nodded positively to everything I asked of him, but he did absolutely nothing because he didn’t speak or understand one blessed word of English.

Talking with some teachers at lunch, I discovered, to my amazement, that I was just about the only one in the building who had ever talked to or even seen the mysterious principal, Mr. Hideaway, who arrived late, never left his office and went home early every day. The school was, indeed, run by Mr. Bensen who was not the principal but was a paraprofessional.

I did get one thing from Mr. Hideaway as early the next Monday a man showed up to fix the windows. For the next two months, he would be my on and off again companion in the room. To fix the windows he had an iron like device that burned into the dried window putty to melt it so the broken and cracked pieces of windowpane could be removed. The smell from this was a choking stink that permeated most of the room, but slowly, the number of broken panes was being reduced. It was an unending job, however, as just about every Monday we were greeted with freshly broken windows. But as October moved into November and the mornings and days grew chillier any help was appreciated, despite the terrible smell of success.

Late in October the school had its first open house. It was unlike any open house I had ever experienced. None of the teachers went to their rooms. We all stood at the main entrance in a group not only for safety but also to watch our cars so that they wouldn’t be stolen. No one showed up for the open house, not even Mr. Hideaway. After two and a half hours of standing by the main entrance, everyone quickly left.

As the weather grew progressively colder with the onset of winter, I discovered one other thing missing in my room from time to time – HEAT. It seemed the school boiler worked on a schedule of three days on and one day off. On cold days with no heat, Mr. Bensen came around and told the teachers to take their classes to the library. There, two hundred fifty students and eighteen teachers huddled together, with their coats on, trying to keep warm by their combined body heat. We should really have sent them home, but one of the teachers, in the know, said that Mr. Hideaway refused because he could score points with higher ups by stating that despite the problems we were able to continue education as usual.

By the week before Thanksgiving, I had gotten to know several of the teachers with whom I ate lunch. That Monday, the sewing teacher was commiserating that sometime over the previous weekend someone had broken into her room and stolen ten of the fourteen sewing machines. She went on, Thank God, they took the old ones and left the four brand new Singers behind. I had also found out where the ungodly stench that permeated the school came from. There were no hot lunches, but there were plastic wrapped cold lunches which contained mayonnaise and salad dressings in small plastic packets. The students took these out of the lunchroom by the dozens. In the halls, they dropped them on the floors and stomped on them sending mayonnaise and salad dressing flying all over the place where a lot of it was left to turn rancid.

That night the thieves came again. According to the police, they backed up a truck to the rear of the building and took the four brand new Singer sewing machines. They also took the janitor’s brand new snow blower, which probably would never have been used anyway as nobody seemed to be able to communicate with the man. The biggest tragedy to me, however, was that they took almost everything out of my wood shop including the jigsaw, which I had rewired, hand tools and all my lumber, and apparently, to get in the building they had broken dozens of my windows again. This was done after the windows were on the verge of finally being fixed. I could only wish that they had taken Mount Vesuvius. Looking at the mess, I realized I was in big trouble. How could one conduct a wood shop class with no tools and no wood?

Over Thanksgiving I sat down and planned what to do. I went to a local discount store and bought some cheap hand tools, hammers, saws, screwdrivers and nails. Remembering my own childhood, I’d come up with an idea – knock hockey boards. In the pre-Nintendo age, I had high hopes for their success because they didn’t need a lot of wood to make and used simple tools. For most of the four day Thanksgiving break, I searched through factory throwaways, looking for scrap lumber. My biggest coup was finding two trunk loads of pressed board which was used to cover up the back of stereo speakers. Wooden pallets made up the rest of my idea.

That Monday, after Thanksgiving break, I was up and ready to limp on. Using the slick pressboard as a surface the pallet wood was nailed or screwed around the perimeter to keep the puck from flying off the rectangular surface. At each end, was a small slot guarded by a block in front of it. The idea was to angle a wooden puck off the sides, ricochet it behind the block and through the slot, somewhat like a game of bumper pool.

For the first weeks, it was a slow go-sanding, sawing and nailing. When done the students tended to spend more time playing with the finished products instead of learning how to use the few tools we had left. The first Monday, in December, all of this changed dramatically as one of the second period students announced he had sold his knock hockey board for five dollars. Heads turned and ears perked up. By the end of the week, discipline for profit took over. Students worked hard, in groups, to finish their written assignments so they could go into the shop area and work on what was becoming a virtual cottage industry of making knock hockey boards for profit. With Christmas coming on, it was a Godsend for the students who were making money by selling their games. One young man added to the frenzy by proudly claiming his board had brought ten dollars. By the second week of December, I quit the newspaper job. I was simply too busy searching for wood and chipping away at Mount Vesuvius.

On the last day of school, prior to Christmas break, several students presented me with Christmas cards, and as the day went by I truly felt in the Christmas mood. In the shop there was the usual cacophony of banging, sawing and sanding, accompanied by a boom box someone had brought which was belting out Christmas music. Even the burning stink of the window man’s iron was homey, along with the steam radiators hissing and the secretaries screaming over the phone. The students were working away to get one last game board finished for a Christmas present or for holiday money. Near the end of the day, the head of the industrial arts department stopped by and informed me that, due to cutbacks in the department’s budget, my position had been eliminated. I had gone from two jobs to none-Merry Christmas!

When Christmas break was over I called Fentin at the board of education. He told me to report to Simpson Brown for an interview with the principal. Simpson Brown turned out to be a huge century old, three-story building that took up a whole city block. It acted as a sort of breakwater between a large World War II era housing project and the edge of the city’s downtown district. The principal turned out to be a woman in her mid-sixties who, after a ten minute conversation, offered me the job of teaching the eighth grade coaching class. She gave me a room number and told me to report for work the next day.

The next morning, I walked into my new classroom, which was, thank God, clean with no Mount Vesuvius or broken windows. There were large windows, which looked out on a brick wall three feet away, but no drunk. Walking around the room, I became engrossed in some student work which was stapled to the walls. Interested in the student papers it was a few seconds before I became aware that a man was standing behind me. He introduced himself as Dr. Macy, the vice principal, (Hereafter vice principal will be referred to as VP which is what they were called by everybody) and announced that he was there for my formal evaluation. I was shocked, a formal evaluation on my first day on the job. I had never heard of such a thing. A formal evaluation is usually done, for even new teachers, after several months or at least until they know the general layout of the job. A formal evaluation is the determiner of whether you will be let go or rehired for the next year. I managed to stammer out that I hadn’t seen the textbook or even met the students yet. He looked me up and down, and said, Don’t worry. Unless you’re a complete idiot, you’ve got the job. You’re the first one of the last three applicants who didn’t show up in sneakers or a sweat suit. So life began in the coaching class.

CHAPTER 2

Vacationing at Simpson Brown

THE COACHING CLASS WAS, in reality, a special education class for students who were incapable of learning in a regular class and so had been exiled to my Siberia. Somewhat apprehensively I awaited the thundering herd. There were twenty-one students listed on the roll, but when the bell rang and the dust settled there were just six students sitting politely in front of me. I spent the first hour trying to get the lay of the land. I learned the six students in front of me were the total class. The others, except for two girls, had not shown up in months. The students told me that over Christmas vacation the two missing girls went back to Puerto Rico to get married. As a result, it would seem my class total was six and six of the nicest young people I would ever teach. I was befuddled as to why they were in a special class for unruly students.

As January 1971 rolled along I slowly began to discover why the students were there and was stunned to say the least. Simpson Brown was a K-8 school with ten teachers who taught seventh and eighth grades. I found a few answers, during our eighteen minute lunch period, by simply listening to those seventh and eighth grade teachers in what passed as a lunchroom but was so small that every day at least a half dozen people had to eat standing up. It seemed that three older teachers, all of whom were on the verge of retirement, and also close friends of the principal had her ear. They also had a thing against students who were caught chewing gum, eating candy or passing notes in class. They simply had these problem students, with the principal’s approval, transferred to the coaching class. On several occasions over the next few weeks at lunch, they marveled at how I was able to handle these incorrigibles, and pretty soon most of the staff began to think I was a miracle worker. In reality, it was the softest touch I ever had in teaching.

Of the six students, who I had, three were African-American and three were Hispanic. When the weather was bad-the three Hispanic students tended to stay home. When the weather was good-the three African-American students tended to stay home. The end result was that I seldom had more than three or four students in class despite calling their homes where I got busy signals, no answers and recorded messages stating the phone had been disconnected. Occasionally, someone answered in Spanish, which I didn’t speak, and sometimes even a student answered with a lame excuse. Once, for a period of two entire days, no one showed up at all, and I spent the time sitting in my room reading The Hobbit. Miracle worker, indeed! With this docile group this was not a job; it was a vacation.

In April the sewing teacher, across the hall, had to go to a two-week seminar one period a day. The period matched up to my free period, and so I was slotted in as the substitute-sewing teacher. With much misgiving I walked into the sewing class hoping to get something done in a subject I knew absolutely nothing about. I had always believed in being totally up front with my students, and I explained to the dozen girls present that I was a total neophyte and hadn’t the foggiest idea how to use a sewing machine. We made a pact. They obviously knew what they were doing, and I didn’t so we reversed roles. They became the teachers, and I was the student. They loved it, along with the fact that I let them bring in a radio to listen to while they worked. Every day, for the next two weeks, one or two of the more patient girls helped me learn the mysteries of a sewing machine. It became such fun all around that when the sewing teacher returned I missed teaching my sewing class.

Several days later, during my planning period, I was sitting at my desk grading papers when there was a knock on the door. It was the sewing teacher. She invited me to come over to her class. The girls, who had taught me sewing, had a surprise for me. One of them had baked a cake for a little party, and to honor me they had all chipped in by hand embroidering a sewing machine and framing it as a gift.

The school year seemed to fly by, and in late May, I decided to take my class on a field trip. The first week of June, the city put on an arts festival downtown. As several of my students were better than average drawers, I decided to take them to the festival and to reward them all for their efforts. To do this I had to obtain the principal’s permission, which was usually a matter of simple paperwork, but in this case, the approval would prove very difficult to obtain. After broaching the subject with my VP, I received a message, in my school mailbox, the next day to meet with him after school. That afternoon I entered his office to be greeted not only by him but the principal as well. Both were in an extremely negative mood about my proposed field trip. Apparently, they knew nothing about the character of my students. For almost a half hour, we hashed it out. They brought up all kinds of supposed problems.

What if there was a fight?

We haven’t had a fight since I started teaching them in January.

What if they try to steal something?

I’ve never had any problems with them over that.

What if they run away?

Perhaps they might like to stay home from time to time, but they’ve never skipped school by simply walking out of the building.

What if they start a riot? What if they destroy something?

"What if’s until finally, after almost an hour of parrying their thrusts, they reluctantly gave me their permission. As I left the office, I was beginning to understand, in this school system, it was not really the students that administrators cared about but instead their own asses. Everything must be business as usual. Heaven help anyone who deviated from the norm.

Ten days later my little invasion force of six students set off to destroy downtown. It was such a warm sunny day that all six had shown up for the two block walk. Reaching the outdoor art exhibit our little group slowly wound its way, caught up in the exhilaration of a beautiful day shared with classmates and friends outside the confines of school. Then, after progressing two blocks of the exhibit, we turned a corner, and it happened. There, before us, was a group of tables filled with books, an exhibition put on by the public library, a sea of brand new books stretching from traffic light to traffic light.

Here our invasion came to an abrupt halt as our little group began rummaging through the piles of books. Slowly, one by one, they detached themselves from the hubbub around them and sat down on fireplugs, the curb and eventually some folding chairs offered up by the library employees. Ten o’clock - no movement; eleven o’clock - still reading; noon - still buried in the books. Fearing they might starve to death, I hurriedly ran into a fast food restaurant behind us. I came back with hamburgers and sodas which I passed out to my students while they continued reading. One o’clock, two o’clock and still they read on. At 2:30, feeling like a malevolent tyrant, I got them up and moving back to school which had already let out for the day. By three o’clock, we came straggling up to the school’s main entrance to be greeted by the principal and VPs with trepidation written all over their faces. Querying me about our little expedition they couldn’t believe that no one had run away, been arrested or injured in a fight. They simply could not believe that my students had spent the whole day reading as they walked away muttering incredulously among themselves.

As the school year drew to a close, the last week was spent in preparing for the eighth grade promotion ceremony. Rehearsals went off beautifully with speeches and music being practiced to perfection. I was particularly impressed with one young girl’s singing ability. She had a beautiful voice. Naturally, none of my students was chosen for the pageantry. The administrators were afraid they might act up.

Rehearsals over, the big day dawned for the eighth graders, who showed up all spit and polished, ready for their first graduation. The students all assembled on the second floor. At the designated time, they marched in single file down to the auditorium and waited in front of the closed doors for the signal to enter. Soon the doors were opened wide, and we walked into a scene which appeared to be right out of the Eighteenth Century London institution of Bedlam. Babies were crying. Several toddlers were running up and down the aisles. A couple of youngsters were climbing over the seats. The noise of conversations and shouted greetings filled the air. The front rows were supposed to have been kept vacant for the graduates by administrators. All during rehearsals they had repeatedly told us to sit with our eighth graders while they would keep order. The administrators were nowhere in sight. The front rows had been usurped by trespassers, who had to be coaxed out of their seats, which further added to the confusion.

Eventually, the graduation procedure began fighting to overcome the constant din of distractions all around. During one of the student speeches someone turned on a boom box and had to be escorted out by two teachers. As the students began filing onto the stage to get their certificates, young children continued to race up and down the aisles, and somewhere behind them all a toddler had discovered the delightful noise that a wooden auditorium seat made by being slammed up and down. Finally, as the young girl with the beautiful singing voice stepped up on the stage to end the festivities with her song, a fight broke out in the hallway outside the auditorium. So ended the last eighth grade graduation from Simpson Brown.

CHAPTER 3

Life in a Submarine

THE NEXT YEAR ALL seventh and eighth grade students were to be moved to a brand new middle school being built blocks away. To that end we upper grade teachers, during the school year, had spent one day a month of in-service training to acquaint ourselves with the layout of the new building and prepare for its opening. During that time, I had been given a full time position as a social studies teacher at the new school and so was no longer a substitute teacher. In that vein, I spent a considerable amount of time preparing to teach social studies at Quabbin Middle, the new school.

Two days before school started I received a letter from the board of education welcoming me to Wolf Middle School as an English teacher. Two days later, after having spent the previous day just trying to find the place, I was welcomed with open arms in the parking lot by Mr. Williams.

Wolf Middle took up a large city block. It was surrounded on three sides by a weary neighborhood. Fronting the, all but windowless, school was its blacktopped parking lot. Across the street, from the parking lot, was a seedy business district consisting of a greasy spoon restaurant, a bar, a gas station and a post office. The school, itself, was run by a staff of five administrators: a principal and four VP’s. Mr. Brown, the principal, followed what seemed to be the norm in the system by never being seen outside the main office. Each VP ran a section of the school called a house each of which consisted of about three hundred students.

House B was run by Mr. Williams, the man who had chased me from the parking lot on my first day. He was a rather short man who became as agitated as a mongoose facing a cobra whenever he was faced with a problem. Waving his arms and muttering to himself he would walk away grumbling What do you want me to do about it? or Well! It’s not my problem! As nearly as I could tell the only thing he did do was run the parking lot. He was jokingly known among the staff as the highest paid parking attendant in all of Christendom. His sole job seemed to be to produce a list of parking spaces at the beginning of every school year. Other than his precious parking lot he simply walked away from every other question or problem sputtering.

House C was run by Mr. DiFerenzo. His standing orders to his teachers were to be in front of their classroom doors between periods and not to speak to anyone, student, parent or staff member. If you broke that rule, you would be given a letter of reprimand in your personnel file. He was also fond of standing next to his silent teachers and quietly mumbling racist oaths about his students as they passed by.

Mr. Osterpuck ran House D. The students called him Mr. Octopus because they could not pronounce his name. Each of the VPs had his own secretary. Mister Osterpuck’s secretary was a bright young African-American lady named Violet Desmond. Many years later our paths would cross again.

My classroom was in House A, and like all but the main and house offices, the library and the stairwells, was windowless. Over the next two decades I would jokingly refer to it as being in the submarine service. My VP was Doctor Sevinsky. He insisted on being called Doctor Sevinsky although everyone knew that his PHD came from a mail order college in Florida which no other school system in the country recognized as valid. He seemed totally incapable of making even the smallest decision. Doctor Sevinsky came to Wolf from another system, in the state, where he had failed to suspend a student for attacking another student. The unsuspended student walked out of his office; an hour later, he found his previous victim, pulled out a knife and stabbed him to death.

There was another administrator with whom I had dealings, my English department chairman, Mr. Featherson. Featherson’s motto had to be don’t rock the boat and make me look bad. He wanted a spotless record so he could get out of our system and find a nice cushy principal’s job in a quiet suburban school system. The only way I could describe him was that he was completely out of his element.

At Wolf I was a member of a five person team. Surprisingly, only one of us was from the immediate New England area, the social studies teacher, Leon Masco, our team leader. The term team leader didn’t mean he had any administrative power but only got stuck with doing extra work. Perhaps, because of that he was strongly pro-union and was also the union representative for our house of roughly twenty teachers.

In his union capacity, Masco had additional work to do in trying to solve problems created by Doctor Sevinsky before they became grievances. Grievances were filed by our union building representative and were to be adjudged at the principal’s level. Failure there meant the problem went to an assistant superintendent’s hearing. If nothing was accomplished through these steps then it was on to a hearing before a state arbitrator. Very rarely it could even go before a state labor board court. This process I would get to know well because during my last ten years at Wolf I would be a union building representative or a building rep as we were commonly called.

The science teacher, Jay Willington, like me, was from Illinois. He was an excellent teacher and had the awards to prove it. Like Violet Desmond, Jay and I would cross paths long after he had transferred out of Wolf. Lena Bell was our reading lab teacher who struggled mightily trying to raise our student’s reading capacity above the second grade level. Lena was another Midwesterner from Indiana.

The students we worked with were seventh and eighth graders, all were six to seven years behind their grade levels. We were called a basic studies cluster, but, in reality, we were the precursor of special education.

The fifth and final member of our team was Charles Jacque, a French Canadian. Charles was from a small village in Quebec where his family must have made up a large part of the population as he had nineteen brothers and six sisters.

Charles, or Frenchie as the students called him, was one of those people, who once you met and got to know, you never forgot. Because of his accent, it was very easy to see why students referred to him as Frenchie. He had the body of a weight lifter because he aspired to win the body builder title of Mister Senior America. Our rooms were only a few feet apart, and so I got to know him pretty well. He had been a roofer and the only one of his twenty-five siblings not to graduate from college. One day, while working, he had fallen from a roof and severely hurt his back. Months later, while recuperating, he drove out to California to see one of his brothers. On the way there, driving through Nebraska, he picked up a female hitchhiker who had just graduated from college.

His story to me about the incident was, She was so smart that she made Charles feel dumb, and so Charles decide to go to college. Yes, indeed, he did. By the time I met him, he had two Masters Degrees and could speak English, French and Spanish so fluently that he was often called upon to translate for Hispanic parents. Like me, it was also his first year at Wolf, and like me, he had a department chairman who had no idea the kinds of students we were teaching.

His chairman was an ex-army officer and used to giving and following orders in an army chain of command. Unfortunately, schools are not like armies. In his mind, if the curriculum for day number twenty-five called for you to be on page forty-two in the textbook, then you had better be on page forty-two.

Three weeks into the school year, the ex-army officer visited Charles’s algebra class and went apoplectic upon discovering not only was the class not on page such and such, but they also were not being taught algebra. They were, instead, being drilled in the multiplication tables. Charles was told. Teach algebra. He protested stating that most of his students were incapable of multiplication and simple division, let alone algebra. From that day on, the chairman began showing up once, twice and sometimes three days a week. The arguments went back and forth for almost a month. They even intruded into our team meetings as all five of us tried to convince this man not one of our students had a reading level over second grade or the ability to do algebra yet.

I can remember walking out of school many nights listening to Charles and commiserating with him about his chairman. One afternoon, however, in late October, he had a smile on his face and didn’t say a word about his chairman. This made me curious, and I asked him how things were going. His answer floored me. A day earlier his chairman had popped into his room with his usual admonitions, and Charles had lost his temper. He lifted the man up, under his armpits, held him against the wall, a foot off the ground, and proclaimed, If you ever come into my room again I kick your ass. The chairman fled the scene and to everyone’s total surprise was never seen in Charles’s room again.

Over the next three years the legend of Charles would continue to grow. Just waiting for him to come into school every morning was an adventure in anticipation. Nobody could ever figure out what he might wear. One morning he would show up in a five hundred dollar suit, two hundred dollar shoes, a custom made shirt with silk tie and a floor length fur coat. The next day he would show up in tattered jeans, a sweatshirt with the sleeves ripped off to reveal his bulging biceps and a grungy pair of sandals.

With Charles mornings were always a surprise. One morning he came into school with one of the most contented looks I’ve ever seen. I asked him why the smile. His succinct reply was Last night Charles met twins. Twins treated Charles good.

On yet another occasion he came in looking like a half drowned puppy. His reply to my query this time was Last night Charles went to a club that had dancers on stage. Charles was sitting at a table by himself in front of the stage. Four guys start standing around his table and so Charles give them his table and stand off to the side. Then one of them tell Charles get out of my way. You blocking my view. So Charles get into a fight with all four. Charles beat them all up and get arrested. Charles brother had bailed him out of jail just an hour before school had begun.

Charles could be diplomatic and charming, but he could also make a mad grizzly bear look like a kitten. One morning, in the spring of his first year, he got into an argument with a particularly nettlesome secretary in the main office. It was over some insignificant thing but ended up in a real blowup with Charles telling the secretary, in no uncertain terms, where she could go. That afternoon, as we were having a team meeting in an empty classroom, there was a knock at the door which was opened by the executive secretary. Standing in the doorway, she demanded that Charles apologize to the secretary he had offended. Before anything else could be said or done Charles threw a book at her, hitting the wall next to the door frame with a sharp crack, and yelled, Charles not going to apologize to her ever, and you can go to hell too!

Charles got to be famous among the students. The first day of a new school year became a ritual for many new seventh graders. They padded down the hallway, past his classroom door, and, almost in a whisper, would ask me as I stood there, Is that Frenchie’s room?

Yes.

Oooh, was usually the reply, and the groups would go absolutely silent as they tip toed past his room while some of the braver students cast furtive glances at his door.

Charles often had back problems, as a result of his roofing accident, and from time to time, it would act up so badly that he would be forced to take days off. Five years after being with us Charles didn’t return after Easter break. We all assumed it was his back acting up again, but as the days stretched into weeks and months, a rumor spread that he had resigned and gone west to teach. No one knew for sure.

Two years after I retired, while reading the paper, I came across his obituary. He had died in California where he had taught in East Los Angeles for twenty-nine years. The article also mentioned that he had been teacher of the year six years prior to his death. I thought to myself that somewhere up in heaven even the angels were tiptoeing around in his presence.

During my first two years at Wolf, I too, like Charles, had a totally incompetent chairman. He was responsible for the content of what I taught. There was, however a serious problem between us. He didn’t believe in using textbooks. For my first two years at Wolf, I spent endless hours every night writing out dozens of papers to be mimeographed for five different classes. Every morning I got to school at least a half hour early to run off hundreds of copies. To this day, I honestly believe that somewhere in Maine there is a lumberjack who sent his kids to college on the money he made chopping down trees for wood pulp to make all the paper I used.

I spent the entire first year, at Wolf, using every argument I could think of trying to convince him, to no avail, that books were needed to teach literature. Finally, in my second year, I convinced him to come to one of our team meetings so all five of us could lobby for the importance of textbooks in my class. At the meeting, the five of us soon had him backed into a corner which he escaped from by declaring the next day he would show me how to teach literature without books.

The next day he showed up pushing a cart full of portable cassette players and tapes, trailed by Masco, who was curious about his methods. My chairman’s intention was, instead of reading stories, the students would listen to them. What followed was so funny that I almost had to shove my fist into my mouth to keep from laughing out loud. He told Masco and me to sit in the back of the room and observe how it was done, and how it was done beggared description. The students soon began to destroy his technology in a way that would have made the Luddites of the Industrial Revolution proud. Much to their delight they discovered that the volume controls worked. Soon the air was filled with a deafening roar of gibberish as all the tape players boomed forth, but not in the same places. At this point, Masco left, trying to contain himself. As he did so several students discovered the reverse controls, and soon there were even more undecipherable noises filling the room. Students then discovered that by changing quickly from forward to reverse the tapes could be snapped and then pulled out in large spaghetti like heaps. There were also batteries which the students pocketed for their own purposes. By the end of the period, of the original twenty-five machines about half were nonfunctioning, one was missing completely while recording tape littered the floor like New Year’s confetti, and so hundreds of dollars of tape players and tapes were ruined. What a shame the money couldn’t have gone for books. Without a word my chairman piled the debris on his cart and fled my room. I would never see him again although I would hear of him very shortly.

Every department chairman had an annual pet showcase to gain publicity and enhance their standings with their boss, the assistant superintendent of secondary schools. My chairman’s way of getting noticed was by having a city-wide spelling bee for the middle school students. The spelling bee was held in a high school auditorium before hundreds of parents, board of education bigwigs and the media. It was also always held in the first week of April which was shortly after his debacle on how to teach English without books. The tension on the auditorium stage was high as the field was reduced to one. All the lone student standing had to do was spell HIPPOPOTAMUS correctly. Out came the letters H-I-P-O-P-O-T-T-A-M-U-S to which my chairman replied, That is correct. You are the winner. The next day the newspaper ran an article about the incident, and by the next September, the April Fool was gone, hired as a suburban principal.

My new chairman soon made me yearn for the good old days of Featherson, Her name was Doctor Bennet, and again God help you if you didn’t preface the Bennet without doctor. The rumor was that she got her doctorate from the same place as Doctor Sevinsky. Apparently the mail order school placed great emphasis on being addressed properly. To me she was simply the Ice Queen, a woman with one goal, to make a name for herself, and if the students or teachers got in her way- too bad.

She did, at least, bring in textbooks, but we got off to a bad start from the very beginning. The textbooks were light years ahead of what my students were capable of reading and understanding. I had one epic attempt to get her to understand that my eighth grade students’ average reading level was below second grade. They simply could not read Beowulf. My first mistake was in saying, These kids can’t understand that. for which I was abruptly cut short and given a lecture on how my children were not to be referred to as kids but only as students. Switching my tack, I asked for more time, at least, to teach Beowulf. Her answer was that the curriculum she had created called for it to be read and taught in two days, and so, it would be done in two days. I then made another mistake in my argument by saying, Mrs. Bennet, they need more time to and was again abruptly cut short with a curt, The proper way to address me is Doctor Bennet. It went on like that for almost ten minutes after which I was shown the door. It took over a week to get through Beowulf, and it made me become active in the teacher’s union. It also marked the beginning of my war against the